Paul Ryan

By Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

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Bio

The roots of Paul Ryan’s conservatism run deep. He was only 16 years old when he found his father dead in his parents’ bedroom. “I concluded I’ve got to either sink or swim in life,” Ryan told The New Yorker in 2012, one week before he was named Mitt Romney’s pick for vice president. His political views began to coalesce around that time, his brother recalled, telling The New York Times, “Paul went to work at McDonald’s and began to pull his own weight, and becomes class president the same year.”

Twelve years later, at the age of 28, Ryan was elected to the House of Representatives from his home state of Wisconsin, making him the second-youngest member of Congress. Steeped in the philosophy of Ayn Rand and his Roman Catholic upbringing, Ryan has said he was “miserable” as a freshman lawmaker during the George W. Bush years, when his party was complicit in helping run up massive federal-budget deficits. But the financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama wiped the slate clean for Ryan, who seized the opportunity to re-introduce himself as a beacon of fiscal conservatism and an “ideological hero” to the growing Tea Party movement. In 2007, he became the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, where he built his reputation as a policy wonk, before becoming chairman four years later.

Ryan’s political rise during the Obama era was swift. In 2011, he burst onto the national stage by delivering the rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address, and in 2012 found himself on the Republican presidential ticket alongside Romney (following in the footsteps of his mentor Jack Kemp). While Romney lost the election, Ryan emerged not only unscathed but also empowered as the spiritual leader of a newly energized party. His austere Path to Prosperity, popularly known as the “Ryan budget,” became the guiding principle of the arch-conservative 113th Congress, calling to replace Medicare and Medicaid with voucher programs, slash federal earmarks to benefit programs, and reduce tax rates for those in the wealthiest brackets.

When the long-beleaguered Representative John Boehner announced he would be resigning his position as Speaker of the House, vacating his leadership post atop a party that had become increasingly divided between its establishment and Tea Party factions, Washington insiders turned desperately to Ryan to fill the job. Despite repeatedly turning it down, he eventually relented, and in October 2015 was elected as the youngest Speaker since 1875. In the final months of the contentious 2016 Republican presidential primary, the G.O.P. establishment once again turned to Ryan for salvation, hoping to draft him into a convention fight with Donald Trump, the party’s divisive front-runner. “Everyone thinks he’s Republican Jesus,” one Senate staffer was heard joking, though ultimately Ryan was wiser than to sacrifice himself for a doomed mission to save the party. There’s always 2020.